Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note:
we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites
link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.

We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles.
You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind:

Encyclopaedia Britannica articles are written in a neutral, objective tone for a general audience.

You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.

Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources.

At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are best.)

Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions.

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for
anti-Semitism
in the early 20th century. The document purports to be a report of a series of 24 (in other versions, 27) meetings held at Basel, Switz., in 1897, at the time of the first Zionist congress. There Jews and Freemasons were said to have made plans to disrupt Christian civilization and erect a world state under their joint rule. Liberalism and socialism were to be the means of subverting Christendom; if subversion failed, all the capitals of Europe were to be sabotaged.

The
Protocols
were printed in Russia in abbreviated form in 1903 in the newspaper Znamia
(“Banner”) and subsequently (1905) as an addendum to a religious tract by Serge Nilus, a tsarist civil servant. They were translated into German, French, English, and other European languages and soon came to be a classic of anti-Semitic literature. In the United States Henry Ford’s private newspaper, Dearborn Independent,
often cited them as evidence of a Jewish threat.

The spurious character of the
Protocols
was first revealed in 1921 by Philip Graves of The Times
(London), who demonstrated their obvious resemblance to a satire by the French lawyer Maurice Joly on Napoleon III
published in 1864 and entitled Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu
(“Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”). Subsequent investigation, particularly by the Russian historian Vladimir Burtsev, revealed that the Protocols
were forgeries compounded by officials of the Russian secret police out of the satire of Joly, a fantastic novel (Biarritz) by Hermann Goedsche (1868), and other sources.